


The Shattered Melody of Borrowed Time

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Retirementlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 10:41:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1776172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I have a memory where we woke up together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shattered Melody of Borrowed Time

I think it's important to write these things down when they come to me - a duty perhaps, an ode to everything you recorded meticulously over the years - but especially now. Especially now. 

I always thought - well, I knew - that I would die before I was forty. I believed I was a creature that wasn't designed to deteriorate, to malfunction and to succumb to something as mundane, as banal as age. I was fierce, beating my shouts on the frayed edges of a drowning wind and I had no heart, no blood - not then - but only synapses and wicked tongue. I would die before I reached the tipping point, before my corners became blunted and my skin became grey. It wasn't a sad prospect; you could almost argue I anticipated it impatiently. It was a given thing rather than a miserable thing, it just was. I had a timeline etched before I really knew what I was drawing. 

Of course, if forty came and went and my lungs were still semi-functioning, I'd do it myself. I suppose it's easy to look upon future events with a courage that you know you won't possess nearer the exact moment, but I did. I was my own coward and I thought I was being my own god. 

How stupid I was. Am. But so long ago, then, especially. Especially then. 

If I hadn't lived through all those extra years, all that borrowed time, I would never really have understood how the world breathes. I never would have experienced truly bad daytime television, cold leftover takeaway eaten huddled over warm tea the next morning, heartbreak. I would never know the exact feeling of warm feet amongst and around my cold feet, nestled between Egyptian cotton and sunlight. Or what it feels like to be truly happy, be so happy that your face is pulling this uncontrollably ugly and twisted grin so sharp and magnificent that it feels like you're growing entire cliffs out of your chest and it's so ridiculous you think you'd never burn because you couldn't ever possibly get any warmer. 

But, predominately, I would never have experienced you. And I think that would be the greatest tragedy of all non-happenings. 

So I was just sitting here, sitting and letting the sunlight (under which has never altered, under which I was only ever a temporary visitor) warm my blunted corners, my greyed skin. I was sitting here and watching the bees (my bees, the bees you let me have) and thinking of when I - when we - were so much younger and so much more stupid but somehow so much more intelligent. Something resurfaced. 

I have a memory where we woke up together. In my mind all we can see are the soft morning shadows (golden but flawed, in a way) but I think it was raining, and through the gentle water just beyond the window the sun was waking up. We lay, listening to the sound of our breathing. We might have been tangled between each other, we might have been not touching at all. I just remember the sound our breathing made, twisted and strung together like a solid thing where we were indistinguishable. And between the breaths I remember saying, "Before, when my eyes were always darker - I think - when I looked beyond what I thought was the limit of me, I didn't want to get old." 

This is where in my woven and re-stitched memory we suddenly can hear the rain again and it's writing songs against the glass but we can't read them, we can't read them we can only hear them and listen to the untranslatable language of cloud. It's like we almost can feel the droplets against our skin but I'm dry and safe buried in the cocoon your body makes. And then I said, "But now I think I do, now I think I want to know what your face looks like and what your hands feel like between mine when you're eighty."

I never did, of course. We - the unit, us - we never got that far. 

So now the bees (and I remember the conversation when I said, "let's leave, let's go, we could have bees" and you asked about my work and I mentioned something about it not being as half as interesting as you), they're between me, around my air, nearly reaching my lungs but not quite. 

I'm sitting outside because the house feels too hollow and I can remember the sound your careful feet used to make as you traversed pointlessly from room to room, so now I think you must be wondering why it's sun-ridden and the earth is teeming with far too many lives but for some reason, for some reason all I can hear is the sound of my own breathing, just one set of lungs, my head is filled with the sound of my own breathing, just one, just one. But you see, and this is where my problem is, in my memory which has become so completely diverted from the real truth, there are still two.


End file.
